kevin gilmore

Well when i heard ray's system about 1.5 years ago it was just plain awful. For a whole bunch of reasons. Absolute crap turntable. Not sure what cartridge was in it. Ray's $5k phono preamp with absolutely no subsonics filter. Seriously underpowered amplifiers that were wasting 90+% of their power whacking the woofers around due to the subsonics. 2 way transmission line speakers with dynaudio drivers that remided me of an old eton madisound kit... Now ray has replaced those seriously underpowered amps with new cary amps and has replaced the turntable with a high line VPI which i'm sure has a lot less rumble. So his system is now up to just lousy. The only nice thing i can say about ray's speakers are that they have a wonderful paint job. Which seems to be the only thing ray actually cares about, the look and feel of his stuff. Those are $8k speakers ray said. I own wilsons, B&W, quad esl63's and celestions. Trust me, those ain't $8k speakers anymore than the phono preamp is $5k.

YES people 2 amps in series!!! An unbalanced amplifier drives one wire of the headphone and the other wire goes to ground. It has a specific output impedance. Take 2 of the same amplifiers and drive both sides of the headphone. The maximum output voltage swing doubles. The maximum available current does not change. The maximimum available power is 4 times. THE OUTPUT IMPEDANCE DOUBLES!!! Now if you have a solid state amplifier with an extremely low output impedance in the first place, doubling the output impedance has little effect. But when you have a tube amp with a 120 ohm output impedance (and you are kidding yourself if you actually believe that number for the raptor) you now have a balanced amplifier with an output impedance of 240 ohms. Really no kidding. This is how every single krell amplifier since the fpb series works. This is how every single solid state balanced output amplifier also works. (krell, parasound,big pass labs,crown....) If you really want to hear what a tube amp can do, get your hands on a pair of the small atmasphere amps and hook them up balanced to your headphones. You will be blown away. Circlotrons really work well for this.

What do you expect when you take 2 amplifiers with an output impedance that is already too high and put them in series? Something that can't even drive hd600's...

The whole thing is a joke. If you do replace 2 resistors in the raptor it sounds quite good with hd600/hd650's as you would expect out of the simplest of SRPP designs. For anything 150 ohms or less however it stinks. At least it does not start on fire anymore.

I agree.

I wonder if i'm also one of the few?? Let the trolling continue...

Not even close. My pic's are always 4000 x 3000 pixels cropped from 14mp. jpelg should be eating some shit shortly...

Its so nice to have a class act like Tuberoller here. Really Fred, i did not know you cared that much about me. Thats so sweet.

I stand corrected...

Here is a little "balanced" high end solid state entertainment http://gilmore.chem.northwestern.edu/nx33.jpg Best i could do from the pictures posted over there...

Earl let me be a bit more specific. The picture with the mpx3 and the 6y6g's is clearly for show. Some idiot may see this and try it themselves. Although it probably won't do any damage it won't work either.

Earl, I hate to pick on you or anything, but the 6y6g is a single pentode. It is not going to stick into any mpx3 unless you like the sound of one hand clapping. You are going to need a total of 4 of them to work in a mpx3. Same thing with el34's and 5881's, 6l6's or kt88's. Now the 6080/6as7 would work as those are a dual triode.

Just verified to be true. B52 power supply is exactly the same as 2 x original raptor power supplies with trendy toroid transformer and vertical standup ceramic thin film resistors replacing the 300 ohm series resistors. Lm317 for the filament regulator and Lm783 as the high voltage regulators. Ray is nothing except consistent. Take a piece of shit design and duplicate it many times. Working on schematic of B52 amplifier now, sure seems to be exactly the same as 2 x raptor's with the addition of one extra tube (per channel) to do the unbalanced to balanced conversion. Ray is going to croak when he finds out who sent me the pictures of the inside of the b52 amplifier chassis... $5k He has gotta be kidding.

directly from a person who had his unit upgraded. A particular crack on the plastic of a particular cap migrated to the new power supply. Also notice black caps in one picture, and blue caps in the next... Ray is saving $14... A poor immigrant needs to do such things

Not like i want to beat a dead horse or anything... plitron transformer pricing off line, equivalent hammond pricing $32.67 (100's) cincon cfm40s120 switching supply made in hong kong (EXACT PART!) $22.00 (100's) 470uf/400 volt CDE manufacturer (the blue ones in second picture) $4.99 (100's) 100uf/400volt nichicon $1.81 (100's) circuit board, input recepticle, switch, resistors and diodes, heatsink and regulator chip $20 (absolute max) (oops, lets not forget that oxygen free copper circuit board) So even at $200 ray is still making 100 percent profit even if its all brand new parts.

This just in... For all those people upgrading the power supply, ray actually de-solders all the electrolytics in the high voltage part from the old supply board and puts them on the new board to save money. What a high level of quality customer support. Brand new power supply with pre-burned in caps. Guess the 350 hours of burnin does not apply to this unit

Time for me to speak up again... That $8 switching supply is the same thing that is in the stealth. The ultimate in noisy miserable and unreliable piece of shit. Same thing in those $49 external hard disk drive enclosures. Lasts no more than 1.5 years before the primary rectifier caps explode. And heat will make it worse. Ray is the only person i know that can't even make a simple regulated 12 volt fillament supply thats quiet and efficient. Not sure why, there are at least 50 places he can steal one from. The high voltage supply is under rated for sure. And he is still using a 150 volt regulator part at 250 volts. The price is interesting however. A complete new power supply for $200. Add that to about $100 for the amp board, and you end up with something that really should have a retail price of $499. So those few people that said that the parts cost of the raptor was something north of $900 are completely out of whack. All those people who spent $1295 for a raptor now get to spend $200 for a power supply that runs cool, but is likely to explode 1.5 to 2 years later. What absolutely fabulous customer support. Sell a piece of shit that is way overpriced, then upgrade it with something even worse. How does ray get away with this. Go and buy a new production Zana Deux. Blows the crap out of the raptor for about the same amount of money.

The entire membran sacd collection is available from jpc.de for the unbelieveable price of about $5 per disc. All classical of course, the bach organ music (18 discs) is just wonderful. Also the olympia jazz sacd's (from the olympia jazz club in france) are available for about $10. Fixed price shipping of about $13 for all orders over $50.

http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=82520 $249 plus shipping. You can run it at full power if you have 240 volts available for primary, or at 70% power if you run it as 120 in 120 out. Shipping for 100 lbs...

200 members with brains (except for billy of course) are better than 41215 members with no clue.

I'm well aware of the new krell evolution stuff as i have one on order. I too know many people at the factory. The KAV stuff was always supposed to be entry level mass market krell. Whether or not that has actually happened is hard to tell. Compared to other stuff in that category especially some of the japanese stuff it is hard to tell which is better and by how much. Some companies like parasound design in the usa and manufacture overseas to get the cost down. Krell's attempt at that failed pretty bad. Clearly what happened to levinson is an example of how the high end is disappearing and how quickly. Without harmann international to swoop in and buy levinson, they would be out of business. All their new stuff is less than half the price of the old stuff. The number of baby boomers willing to spend $100k on an audio system or $200k on a home theater system is pretty slim. For those people with huge wads of cash laying around, it is still hard to get them to spend on systems like that because the music business is dying. When its all about how many hours of noise you can cram into your ipod who is going to be interested in krell. I'll continue to buy krell. And I'll continue to buy Wilson. I'm in the minority i'm sure.

Billy as usual you don't have a clue. ABT sells krell locally only, and has only a single store front. They are the only master reference krell dealer within about 100 miles. They also sell the entire line of JMLab speakers including the Grand Utopia (about $85k). They also sell the qualia projector. Basically they sell lots and lots of very expensive and exclusive products. None of which are advertised on their website. They have specific salesman that are the only ones allowed to demo and sell this kind of merchandise. They are no threat to the rest of the krell dealer chain, or any other manufacturer. And yes they sell a BUNCH of krell. They keep at least 6 of the fpb850cx monoblocks in stock at all times for immediate delivery. ($37,500 a pair)

As far as amplifiers go the voltage gain is far lower than other amplifiers of this type. Its the amount of power output that is significantly higher than all other amplifiers designed for headphones. The amount of class A current that can be delivered was designed for dificult loads such as k1000's and qualia's. The signal to noise ratio is way up there too, so while you could use this thing with earbuds, it would be a real bad idea to do so. I'm sure with some very minimal resistor changes i could get it unity gain stable if i wanted to. At a voltage gain of 2 (6db) it is not going to add any detectable noise to any signal.

Once you ditch their amplifier and hook it to something real they sound VERY nice. Certainly at least he60 nice. Their amp though... Yikes is it ever bad. Sounds darker than dark. By the way these headphones with the koss amp play significantly louder than any other electrostic headphone ever made. Louder in fact than virtually all dynamics too. 2400 volts peak to peak stator to stator is almost twice everything else.

What you really want is a mint condition mc275. Way more balls than a mc225. And should you ever see a pair of MC300 monoblocks, or the even more rare mc350 monoblocks find a way to grab them. Output tubes for the mc350's are absolutely impossible to find!